a CityVision project

FELIPE ESCUDERO

Instead of appearing in an orderly structure of past, present, and future, the built environment should take on a simultaneous quality: as in William S. Burroughs description of Tangier, the past and the future contained in the present moment.

Through repetition of the same types of spaces – each being slightly different from one another – the future exists on several dimensions, allowing you to find streets, squares, parks you never saw before. Not as an amalgamation of old and new things put together following a set of rules, but as a collection of timeless objects uniquely organised to favour the primacy of direct experience.

The question remains as to whether ideas will supersede material objects in the future. Take Pythagoreans as an example, a secret group operating under the radar of acceptable social rules in 500 BC. Their ideas were beautiful: women were equal, animals had souls, they understood music in mathematical intervals and they even speculated about the movement of the Earth around the Sun. Although Pythagoreans were persecuted for these thoughts, their ideas persist, showing that the product of the imagination is stronger than any attempt to erase people and their writings.

However it is in the making that lie the vast array of possibilities yet to come. It is in the way we put things together that lies the real power of the imagination.